And Then There Were None

Closing remarks! This Residency, caught in the whirlwind of my final year at Concordia, yielded much less drawings and much more research than I surmised. The Musique ludique game was created in part to break away from habits and ticks in creation (and here I hope I'm paraphrasing its author okay) -- which presupposes that you have a lot to produce and must find ways to vary, or else. That doesn't really correspond with where I'm at in terms of drawing; I'm inexperienced and in awe of the technique enough that any sort of structure is inhibitive. Drawing is still a painstaking, fastidious task; the short directions I derived from the participants' results called for quick, loose, careless sketches, that would outline an idea rather than display skill and look to perfection. I got schooled!

But here's what I derived from the rolls and throws. Picture that.

Amira: 2, 3, 5, 2, 1, 3//le couple mélodique en strates parallèles à densité faible, à articulation unique, à rapport complémentaire//a single image of two characters at different heights saying, at the same time, that they agree.

Marlee: 5, 3, 1, 6, 3, 6//le groupe +1 distinct; mélodique momentanée, maximale, mesurée, prolifération//a single flower on a plant will both multiply and swell up across and off the page.

Lianne: 2, 4, 3, 6, 1, 1//le couple harmonique imbriqué maximal unique imitatif//a single image of a kangaroo and her joey with a neon green halo doing exactly the same move (they're scratching their right ear).

Zoë Ritts: 5, 3, 6, 1, 5, 2//le groupe +1 distinct mélodique multiplicatif minimal polyrythmique réactif//a buck in the tall grass then his doe and their babies but no just one baby at a time.

Zoë Wonfor: 4, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3//l'agrégat mélodique répétitif moyen pulsé complémentaire//a cloud rains (but not too much) intermittently.

Alex: 2, 2, 5, 2, 6, 5//le couple dynamique strates parallèles faible continue imitation/distinction//a large swatch of orange and another of blue superposed horizontally and kind of washed out actually on the entire page and sometimes they mix completely.

Stephanie: 1, 6, 6, 5, 5, 5//l'unité texturée multiplicative forte polyrythmique imitation/distinction//one fairly furry ferret and then a lot more ferrets, in no particular order; they're all walking north but one is jumping on the spot.

Mouse: 6, 5, 6, 1, 3, 1//le complexe en plans multiplicatif minimale mesurée imitatif//MICE, increasingly, and they're all the same, and they're standing around like shingles on a roof.

DD: 4, 5, 5, 3, 1, 4//l'agrégat plans strates// moyen unique accompagnement//like this:

D

 

D

  

Malex: 5, 5, 5, 6, 2, 3//+1 plans // max pulsée complément//a school of blue fish and also a blue frisbee all over the page and magically they flash yellow light.

Wedgie: 5, 3, 4, 4, 3, 4//+1, mélodique imbriqué moyenne mesurée accompagnement//5 blue cotton panties and a cream silk slip in one medium pile and there's a pulley and a hook overhead

pony: 5, 1, 3, 3, 6, 3//+1 timbres additive moyen continue complément//pretty ponies all over the paper and what's this I see they're turning fluffy! And they all like each other.

Dood: 6, 6, 2, 2, 6, 3//complexe texture répétitif faible continue compément//a dood is trying to fix a leaky faucet.

snake: 6, 4, 4, 1, 6, 3 complexe harmonique imbriqué minimal continue complément//Medusa is growing bald.

Nader #GOD: 3, 2, 2, 4, 6, 3//le groupe dynamique répétitif imbriqué maximal mesuré//a tight-knit flock of sheep are screaming #GOD at each other in increasingly #MAD tones.

How much?: 4, 1, 5, 2//12!

I love you: 5, 3, 3, 3//le groupe+1 mélodique additif moyen//the one m&m in a trail mix bag and half of the nuts and raisins are progressively saying I love you.

I'm leaving: 5, 4, 2, 6//+1, harmonie, répétitif, maximale//Keep sayin' that darlin'. Really. Keep saying it. AT THE TOP OF YOUR VOICE.

Énoncer en termes spaciaux la mise en oeuvre: 2, 1, 5, 1//le couple timbres // minimale// two people screaming at each other at the top of their voice and you can see their voice, it's two different shades of red, and one overtakes the other, and the two people are standing very far apart, spatially, like.

the marginally informed: 1, 2, 4, 3//unité dynamique imbriquée moyenne//two-flavor ice cream

I haven't thought about it yet: 5, 1, 5, 2//me neither, in color.

the marginally reformed: 4, 2, 5, 5//agrégat dynamique // fort//students standing on each others' heads and some are very strong.

phoneme: 1, 3, 3, 1//unité mélodique additive minimale//like this:

ʊ

ʊʊ

ʊʊʊ 

call me 514: 4, 2, 5, 5//harmonique additive parallèle forte//inside a dollhouse people on every floor are on the phone and they're angry.

Special thanks to Lianne in helping me redirect my energies. You can look for more shenanigans on sister flo, and musical ones on early horse. Ta!

Books

Music and Literature Issue One / Fall 2012

Stories and conversations and manuscripts and the programs of musical evenings: I seem in throughout the residency to have followed in the footsteps of "Pärt, Selby, Marcom", the first issue of the Music and Literature magazine. There is a certain fastidiousness I can completely relate to in terms of the collecting of any little trace of an event, a thought, a draft. I mostly read the sections of the book relating to Pärt, and most of it is really the work of a historian, retracing every slight tendency and documenting a break or a choice with the utmost precision for fear we might forget. It places a great deal of importance on the processes of creation, which is, in the end, what the work around and from Musique ludique has been about.


Book suggestions
Bailey, Derek, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, 1980
Ross, Alex, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, 2007
Zimmermann, Walter, Desert Plants: Conversations with 23 American Musicians, 1976

DEUX COUPS IV: FINALE

F So she did... It's funny, I thought for a second, I was wondering whether you hadn't seen that in '67, if there wasn't a pavilion at the expo where Inuit throat singers would have been invited

R On film, certainly, but not the singers themselves

F Had you heard any throat singing before, or was that like, whoah?

R Well, you'd always hear a little bit of it each time they'd show a documentary on the Inuit, we weren't, it wasn't new it was just that, when I saw them perform on stage, then I understood the, the technique of what it was they were doing, and it, it really interested me as a tool because it's, it's a musical game, it's not a score, and the first one who laughs loses, eh, you get it, you have to make the other laugh

F The first one who laughs, it's like barbichette (*a game for two in which each grabs the other by the chins; they sings the riddle, "je te tiens, tu me tiens, par la barbichette, le premier qui rira aura une tapette" and then stare at each other until one or the other cracks up and thus is promptly slapped)

R Exactly, it's a musical barbichette

F Musical

R And that's, that's it, that's what interested me so much

F And that's your binary mode

R That's my number 2

F Number 2

R Yeah, it's action-reaction

F And you called it DEUX COUPS.

R DEUX COUPS but it meant that each of the two musicians could only play two notes before the other could reply, so all you can exploit is, "Do I make him wait or do I give it to him rightaway?" You understand, it's, and then you create a tension, you create a rhythm, for instance you go, "Pom pom?" and he replies, "Pom pom."

"Pom pom?

Pom pom.

Pom pom?

Pom pom.

Pom pom?

Pom pom.

Pom!"

F HA

R And then normally he'll, either he's stuck, either you've tricked him and he plays, or he's seen you coming and he doesn't, but for the public all you do is you watch and your can easily tell that they're waiting for each other or cheating each other, at one point with Jean Derome we were doing like, fake echoes,  so I'd go, "Pom pom, pom pom, pom pom, pom pom, pom pom..." and then he'd go "Yeah, but where does this all end?" HUHU so there's all this strategy and this way of

F HHHHHHH

R ... of playing with the other musician and with the material

F Did that amuse people?

R Of course! 'Cause, we'd explain the rules to the public, so the public doesn't expect a nice melody, it doesn't expect a, a thing, it watches as a game unfolds between two musicians and there he'll find something, the most surprising that will, you know, there's a sort of participation from the public when you know the rules...

Watercolours and Bound Drafts

DEUX COUPS III

F But in '71, what did you know of Inuit singing?

R Well, I knew the... I had heard Inuit singing, I even attended a few performances, because at the time the Société de musique contemporaine, the SMCQ, was organizing what it called Musialogues with Maryvonne Kendergi and they invited Inuit throat singers and they performed

F Maryvonne who?

R Kendergi, K-E-N-D-E-R-G-I, she's a musicologist and was teaching at the University of Montreal at the time, she would organize these, these conferences that she called the Musialogues, and for those Musialogues she invited Xénakis, Stockhausen,

F HHHHHHH

R Messiaen, um,

F HELLO

R They all came, they came and talked to us, Takemitsu,

F Who's that? Is he Japanese?

R Yes he is, I had sent you a, a

F YES! Yeah, yeah, right, I remember

R So all these, these composers from the 70's came and talker about their work and at the same time she invited um, a Spanish band, ZAJ, like um Z-A-J and they would, um, perform with all sorts of gestures and moves according to musical scores, it was, it was, there was no sound, and it was just this activity that was organized by the

F That's like Mme Cholette's scales! (*Mme Cholette was my music prof at the little school -- she would make us sing scales stressing each note with our hands, higher and higher like they were climbing a staircase)

R Mme Cholette, yeah, but ZAJ would put on a hat, take it off, sit down, stand up

F Very Fluxus that

R Very Fluxus, that's it, but that was in the 60's, you know, I'm talking about '71, '72, we were pretty close to Fluxus then

RULES

DEUX COUPS II

F When I start putting a tune together, I always try to go where I wouldn’t, I mean that you have, you have all the major harmonic progressions stuck in your head and when you have a note, there’s another that follows and it’s very natural, it’s what you hear everywhere, and

R Hm

F When I start, I have – I have a musical phrase, and then.. That phrase, it would go somewhere naturally in pop music or in… and then I’m like, “Where can I go from there...”

R It’s an effort to avoid what…

F “…that wouldn’t be that?”, because it bothers me, that music bothers me, it’s beautiful and it makes you cry but it’s not interesting

R It’s a very common road to, um… take, so um if you want to branch off you have to um…

F If you want other colors… I think that the…

R I like it, I like the common flow of music, but my game is more about creating breaches, meaning to interrupt the flow, and to find out what will happen in the breach, in the pause, that’s where, that’s where it all becomes interesting…

F Yeah

R So there’s always something that, that is quite organic, that belongs to your own clichés, to what you’ve always heard which is the common language when you start improvising, and all of a sudden, you just stop! And from there, you do the first thing that jumps into your mind, which is

F Pbläh!

R And then you respond to something else

F Huhu! Yeah, it feels good to put in a cliché or two sometimes. Or even

R Well…

F The suggestion of a cliché, half a cliché or…

R That’s it. Because that’s what it is, you want, it’s like poetry, it’s, you can always write Letterist poetry, but there’s just nobody who’s into that! It’s better to write poems that are…

F What are Letterist poems?

R It’s um… with invented words, like Claude Gauvreau’s

F Oh yeah, Ursonate is so cool!

R Yeah, yeah, but I mean if you make, but the second page from Ursonate, the third page from Ursonate, the second page from Ursonate is, well…

F Rrrrrakete rinzkirakete rinzki rakete kinzki rakete rinzki!!!!

R Hahahaha

F What was DEUX COUPS, was it played with dice?

R No. Before the dice game came along, I put together simple concepts for, for games. Meaning that I got into something that is not all that common in occidental music, but that exists in aboriginal music, this idea of musical games.

F Wait a second…

R For instance, DEUX COUPS is very much inspired by Inuit singing

F Aaaaaaaaah…

R It’s also inspired by ping-pong. How do you introduce a, if you don’t have harmonies or melodies of things like that how will you create a wait, a suspense, a tension, an interest for um, for um music well I thought about sports, and DEUX COUPS is a sport

F Wow, I just read... You know, in my, my 499 class, it's on, on contingency, so dice games, and... and I read a paper on improvisation (*it's Edgar Landgraf's "Improvisation: Form and Event. A Spencer-Brownian Calculation" in Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, 2009, esp. p. 191), the second reading we... um, read which likened improvisation to sport. Which drew a really really neat and precise parallel between improvisation and sports it,s really um, you have a frame, and then you allow things to develop...

R Well, hockey is, improv and hockey are pretty similar I find, except that hockey players have to score goals, in improv, there's no real goal to score, there's just a structure, but it's because it creates a minimum of tension and interest if you are aware of the rules, anyway it's the same thing for hockey, if you don't know the rules, you look at it and wha, they're nuts...

F Same thing for improv, if you don't get it, you're...

R If you don't know what they're doing, you, you, because the result, the result comes second in the end, it's really the, it's really how musicians situate themselves, what rapport they establish, how they use the material, what strategies they employ to get ahead, or accompany, etc... so there's an entire, an entire play there that is really fun to unravel...

At the FARR, with a Canon

 Wrote my first few art history papers with those... At 5 or 6 my mom would sit me up on her knee and we'd leaf through Manet et son temps. I was always very taken with "Le toréro mort"...

 ...in full color...

 Amira's pick, I suspect...

...and my fave. They're all on my phototumblr, too, kid.

DEUX COUPS I

F So. You got your degree in composition at the University of Montreal...

R I studied composition at the University of Montreal between 1972 and '75...

F But you had started working on a version of the game in '71

R My games were created...

F Before your degree

R Before my degree

F Wait a sec...

R But I'd say, um... yeah, before my degree.

F How did it come to you?

R I think that the very first game I put together was DEUX COUPS and it came to me from the process of improvisation itself, it's... I was looking for systematic, um, ways, concepts that would be very... that would be purely improvised. Meaning that when you play jazz, you're playing with harmonic progressions, you're playing with melodies, you're working from a specific material, and you also play with a certain language that you can recognize and call jazz. And at that point in time, I... I was already very interested in improvisation, in jazz, but I was interested in, I was wondering, is there a way to improvise on other things than on the conventional language of jazz. From there I started looking for other colors, I started listening to contemporary music, and in those days it was Messiaen, Xénakis, Stockhausen... and I got interested in, rather than writing themes on sheet music and all that, finding what is very specific to improvisation, that is to say, the possibility of reacting, in real time, to a musical proposition. That's what fascinated me, and it's still what I'm interested in today; when I put together little games, I don't want to force people to do something in a specific time frame, I'd rather make them respond to something that is developing, growing in time. So you don't have a score that tells you, "Whup, you gotta slide in there", but a "score" that dictates, "react to this one", "react to that", "react in such a way", which forces you to be in the flow of music. All my games come from this idea of making musicians understand and acknowledge that they must react to each other, because that's the very essence of collective improvisation.

F Collective, because solo improvisation is what

R It's something else entirely... Solo improvisation is being by yourself with yourself, so, um... Yet at the same time, yet even then you can play games with yourself, you can say, "well, Ima do a first one, and then well, I take only the middle of what I just did, and I keep the beginning and the end and I'll develop them later", you're always reflecting on what you can possibly do, and your performance develops along these lines.

Transcript of a Conversation between Robert M. Lepage, composer, cartoonist, and his daughter.

I am almost done transcribing over an hour's worth of small talk and deep thoughts on Robert's musical improv game and his career, and my memories growing up throughout. The French transcription I typed on a tiny, fussy blue thing; the English translation of the funner excerpts I will post up here shortly.

Transcribing I was interested in the sounds of casual conversation and how to spell them. There something strange about both of our speeches -- his is almost indescribable -- I don't hear its accent strongly, I mostly hear the tones, the texture, and the clarity. Mine is accented by many years spent in a French school and some years spent loosening up. And some eagerness, I suppose.

Top down: a 1983 programme for an evening of improv with Jean Derome and Robert M. Lepage; transcript p. 1: Dessine-moi un mouton is actually Dessine-moi une chanson  and can be watched in full here; transcript p. 2: La Princesse Maladroite is one of Robert's characters; she can't dress herself very well so her dad makes her a onesie full of sleeves for arms and legs.

Writings on Pärt

...and writings of. This New York Times article recounts aspects of the life and work of Arvo Pärt, whom I am reading about in detail in a publication called Music & Literature: An Arts Magazine. I was struck by this particular image. I'm reminded perhaps of Xenakis' manuscripts, but especially of the way Prokofiev and Eisenstein would match the music to the storyboard, see below...
 

This would be in the years leading up to the release of Alexander Nevsky, in 1938.

P.S.: This post is largely an effect of stumbling into this delectable tumblr, which apparently is about to shut down. Fill your eyes...